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The Missing Text
The debates of the English New Left in the summer of 1961 as backdrop to the memorable essay by Raymond Williams, printed below—and possible explanation for its first appearance in an obscure, formerly CIA-funded literary journal. Perry Anderson asks how knowledge of it would revise Edward Thompson’s critical assessment of The Long Revolution in NLR.
The Future of Marxism
Published at last in NLR, a remarkable, long-buried intervention by one of the leading thinkers of the early New Left. Characteristically original and independent-minded considerations of the relation of Marxism to the actually existing Communist regimes and the correspondences of socialist theory and practice across the ‘three worlds’, written just after The Long Revolution.
An Afternoon with Althusser
Notes on a conversation in the summer of 1977, when the philosopher made an impromptu visit to the NLR office. Wide-ranging discussion on Althusser’s relations with the PCF, the condition of Marxism, the Chinese and Russian revolutions compared; Trotsky, Sraffa and the problems with Gramsci’s concept of hegemony.
The Party and its Success Story
How should the balance-sheet of Chinese Communism be assessed? In a rejoinder to Perry Anderson’s comparison of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, Wang Chaohua delivers a critical verdict on the record of Mao’s utopianism and Deng’s pragmatism, and the bleak legacy of the crushing of popular aspirations in 1989.
The Abolitionist—II
In the second part of a sweeping reconstruction of the development of Marx’s thought, the ways in which bourgeois society came to be replaced by capitalism as the cardinal object of investigation after the collapse of the revolutions of 1848, and the political lessons of his passage across that watershed for rebellions in the new century.
The Abolitionist—1
Opening salvo of a two-part reconstruction of Marx’s intellectual passage through the Hegelian—then Ricardian—conceptual landscape of his early years, taking him to the threshold of his mature architectonics of capitalism as a mode of production. From a starting-point in the philosophical empyrean of the 1830s to a turning-point with the economic upturn of the early 1850s, the development of one sketch of an historical materialism to the brink of another.
Culture and Society, Then and Now
The idea of culture in Raymond Williams’s classic work, and discrepant readings of it, fifty years on. Gestation amid CP debates on the English tradition, hidden affinities with the Frankfurt School, and counterposition to the verities of today’s liberal multiculturalism.
The Communist Hypothesis
Why does the spectre of May 68 still haunt French discourse? Alain Badiou on the country’s longue durée sequences of restoration and revolt, and the place of Sarkozy’s presidency within them. Lessons in political courage from Plato and Corneille, and a call to reassert the Manifesto’s founding wager.
History and Illusion
My comments on François Furet’s book are sceptical. It therefore seems just to note at the outset that there is much in Le passé d’une illusion which I admire, notably the brilliant and beautifully written first chapter on la passion révolutionnaire, and much with which I agree, having . . . read more
Democracy and the Ends of Marxism
The relationship between socialism and democracy has been a complex and a contested one. To large numbers of socialists it was axiomatic that their project, both the goal of socialism and the movement for it, must be democratic. They saw socialism as the heir to older, liberal and . . . read more
The Travail of Italian Communism
If ‘The Triumph of the Leopard’ (nlr 199) had been written by a member of Rifondazione Comunista—by an Italian Communist who hadn’t yet recovered from the shock of the pci’s death and its resurrection as the pds—a reader could understand (and possibly forgive) the onesidedness . . . read more
Taking Women’s Work for Granted
Lucio Magri’s article on the European Left, in nlr 189, presents an unusually positive and encouraging perspective for radical politics in the coming years, discussing with welcome realism the most disastrous aspects of recent history. It is a valuable aid in what for some of us is . . . read more
The Future of a Disillusion
It looks as though the Soviet Union, or the pieces that it may soon become, will embrace capitalism, or fall into a severe authoritarianism, or undergo both of those fates. That is not an original thought. While a certain amount of humane socialist rhetoric survives even now in . . . read more
The European Left Between Crisis and Refoundation
Today we cannot understand anything of Europe, the European Left or any other problem in the world unless we start out, in a spirit of truth, from the epochal shift of the last few years that has resulted in the political, ideological and economic collapse of the Communist . . . read more
Fin de Siecle: Socialism after the Crash
As we enter the last decade of the twentieth century, the ruin of ‘Marxist-Leninist’ Communism has been sufficiently comprehensive to eliminate it as an alternative to capitalism and to compromise the very idea of socialism. The debacle of Stalinism has embraced reform-communism, and has brought no benefit to . . . read more
What Does Socialism Mean Today? The Rectifying Revolution and the Need for New Thinking on the Left
There has recently been a spate of articles about the end of the socialist illusion, about the failure of an idea, and even about West European or German intellectuals finally coming to terms with the past. In them, rhetorical questions always prepare the way for the refrain that . . . read more
Reflections on the Crisis of Communist Regimes
The massacre in Tiananmen Square last June is unlikely to be the last violent expression of the deep and multiple crises—economic, social, political, ethnic, ideological, moral—which grip many Communist regimes, and which will in due course most probably grip them all. A vast ‘mutation’ is going on throughout . . . read more
The Upturned Utopia
The catastrophe of historical communism stands literally before everyone’s eyes—the catastrophe of communism as a world movement, born of the Russian Revolution, promising emancipation of the poor and oppressed, the ‘wretched of the earth’. The process of decomposition is continually speeding up, beyond anything predicted. This does not . . . read more
Class Politics: The Lost World of British Communism (Part III)
The schism in British Communism, like many of those in Marxist political formations, resembles nothing so much as a war of ghosts in which the living actors are dwarfed by the spectres they conjure up. The debate on the ‘British way’—the major issue at the 1977 Congress when . . . read more
Marxism and Utopianism in the USA
For more than a century and a quarter Marxism has occupied an important position in American social criticism, but never a dominant one. For most socialists between the 1870s and World War One, Marx had set forth primarily an analysis of the laws of capitalist exploitation and accumulation, . . . read more
A Reply to Gundle
In Italy history repeats itself: a general election has been called one year early to avoid a referendum whose result might shake the political and economic establishment represented by the dc, iri and Confindustria. In 1987 nuclear power has taken on the importance of divorce in . . . read more
The PCI and the Historic Compromise
Few on the left will disagree with the view that the turn taken by events in Italy in recent years is deeply depressing. Capitalism is unquestionably more stable today than at any time since the boom years of the late 1950s, and the social and cultural upheavals of . . . read more
Problems of Marxist History
Harvey Kaye is an American professor of Social Change and Development, an enviable title probably not yet adopted anywhere in conservative Britain. It must come more naturally to the American mind, in a country where things are always changing, even if as a rule circularly. One thing that . . . read more
The Indian Left
The record of the major formations of the Indian Left is contradictory in the extreme. Alone in the capitalist world, the two Communist parties (cpi and cpm) have had lengthy experience of administering semi-autonomous regions, while their respective trade union federations have played a major role . . . read more
The PCI Congress
The 17th Congress of the Italian Communist Party was held in Florence between 9 and 13 April, in the midst of Reagan’s first round of sabre-rattling against Libya and his authorization of a new nuclear test in Nevada. Since, as we shall see, the main peculiarity of the . . . read more
International Communism in the Heyday of Stalin
Serious scholarship on the history of Communist Parties has been experiencing a major upswing. Literature was never exactly in short supply. But its value was invariably vitiated by the ingenuousness of its bias, in which the official apologetics of the Communist Parties’ own accounts was matched by the . . . read more
Staying Power: The Lost World of British Communism (Part II)
The Communist Party, in my recollection of it (I left the Party in 1956), was singularly free of what are known, in more conventional political formations, as ‘rows’. Succession struggles of a kind endemic in social-democratic parties were unknown, and indeed for the first ten years of its . . . read more
The Lost World of British Communism
British political life at the present moment seems peculiarly fissiparous. Four major parties are competing for the popular franchise (in Wales and Scotland five) where previously there were two, and there is an amoeba-like growth of minorities and tendencies within the parties themselves. With the rise of the . . . read more
Judging the PCI
We make our own history but never under conditions of our own choosing. Political parties are normally to a greater or lesser extent reflections of socioeconomic realities, even if occasionally, as in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, they have been known to have lost contact with any reality outside their . . . read more
Crisis in British Communism: An Insider’s View
The Communist Party of Great Britain is in the throes of a severe crisis. Political scissions and antagonisms between different tendencies, struggles for control of the Party machine and its publications, expulsions of leading militants, forced suspension of the work of major structures present a dramatic spectacle of . . . read more
The Eclipse of Spanish Communism
In the brief political history of Eurocommunism, which emerged as a public international current in 1974 and has lived only the shadowiest existence since the break-up of the Union de la Gauche in 1977–78, the course of the Communist Party of Spain (pce) merits at least as . . . read more
Roots of British Communism
The historiography of the British labour movement in the twentieth century has been dominated by a Whiggish concern with the rise and consolidation of the Labour Party and the emergence of trade unionism as an estate of the realm. Even Marxist historians have found it difficult to escape . . . read more
On Sneevliet, the Dutch Communist Party and the February Strike of 1941
At the very end of the article by Michael Williams on the Dutch revolutionary Henk Sneevliet (nlr 123) there is a misleading remark which calls for rectification. It is of relatively little importance for the main argument of the article, but in my opinion it expresses a . . . read more
Sneevliet and the Birth of Asian Communism
Henk Sneevliet was a founder-activist of three Communist movements—the Dutch, Indonesian and Chinese—and played a prominent role in the early years of the Communist International. Arguably no other socialist of the period had such a creative and active internationalist career. His profound understanding and sympathy for Asian nationalism . . . read more
Our Debt to Sraffa
Italian Communists are joined to Sraffa by an ineradicable political and human debt of gratitude. It is hard for us even to grasp his full significance for Gramsci: the role he played during Gramsci’s long years in fascist jails is a priceless and crucial element in our own . . . read more
Introduction to Sraffa
Piero Sraffa was born in Turin in 1898, the son of a law professor at the university. As he himself described in a 1924 letter to Gramsci (quoted in the article by Ferrata below), he was a ‘pacifist socialist’ as an adolescent, in the years 1915–17: the Italian . . . read more
Eurocommunism, Socialism and Democracy
As is well known, a reassessment of the relationship between Democracy and Socialism lies at the heart of Eurocommunism’s theoretical aggiornamento, underpinning the strategy of ‘democratic roads’ to socialism and the conception of a ‘State of advanced democracy’. This reassessment, which is explicitly presented as a revision of . . . read more
What Must Change in the Party
The defeat of the Union of the Left has seriously confused the popular masses and filled many Communists with profound disquiet. A ‘workerist’—or more precisely sectarian—faction is openly rejoicing at the break with the Socialist Party, presenting it as a victory over the social-democratic danger. But the majority . . . read more
Eurocommunism: Left and Right Variants
Fernando Claudin was a leader of the Spanish Communist Party until his expulsion in 1964, and is the author of the already classic The Communist Movement: from Comintern to Cominform. The analysis of Eurocommunism and its relation to socialism put forward in his new book is very timely—both . . . read more
The Italian Road to Socialism
We may distinguish, schematically, three ‘models’ of the road to socialism, three types of strategy for transition. The first is the Leninist, or ‘classical’ model, on Which the revolutionary left bases itself. The growth and intensification of capitalist contradictions heighten working-class combativity and increase class consciousness until these . . . read more
Presentation of Deutscher/Brandler
Isaac Deutscher and Heinrich Brandler had in common the fact that they were among the small number of communist oppositionists from the twenties and thirties who survived into the post-war era without modifying their fundamental political stance: without succumbing to cold-war, social-democratic or Stalinist pressures. In short, both . . . read more
On the Twenty-Second Congress of the French Communist Party
I should like to thank the Sorbonne Philosophy Circle of the Union of Communist Students for inviting me to participate in this discussion. I was left free to choose my own subject. I felt that in France today, not only for Communists but also for all who want . . . read more
Memoir of an Indian Communist
Why do you think the CPI took such a long time to establish itself? What was its early activity and its relations with the nationalist movement: could it be that the infamous ‘Third Period’ of the Comintern also seriously disoriented Indian communists by isolating them at a critical . . . read more
Introduction to Damodaran
On 26 June, Indira Gandhi introduced a State of Emergency which led immediately to the arrest of several hundred opposition leaders and to the imposition of a draconian press censorship on the country’s normally vigorous bourgeois press. Emboldened by the feeble response to these measures, Indira Gandhi induced . . . read more
Brezhnevism in Finland
Finland today presents the unique spectacle within the advanced capitalist world of a mass Communist Party that is now vertically divided into two hostile blocs on a semi-permanent basis. For over six years, Finnish Communism has lived amidst institutionalized schism, but has not yet formally split—unlike Greek or . . . read more
The Kapetanios
Two events—the April 1967 military coup d’état and the outbreak in April 1968 of the rift in the Communist Party—have opened a new period in Greek politics. They have also focused international attention on the situation in Greece. The circles of opinion that registered the impact of these . . . read more
The Split in the Spanish Communist Party
The Communist Party of Spain (pce) was among the communist parties which went furthest in its condemnation of the Soviet military intervention in Czechoslovakia and the Husakian ‘normalization’. This led to a serious deterioration in its relations with the cpsu and provoked a deep internal crisis . . . read more
Introduction to Magri
Lucio Magri’s article on Italian Communism in the sixties, published in Il Manifesto in late 1970, is for a number of reasons of considerable international significance. The Manifesto group was excluded from the pci in June 1969 for their systematic criticisms of its policies from the left: . . . read more
Italian Communism in the Sixties
The last few weeks have seen a new wave of resignations and expulsions from the Italian Communist Party. Attempts by the pci leadership to brand the ‘scissionist manoeuvres of Il Manifesto’ as the cause of these phenomena need hardly be taken seriously. We have made no efforts . . . read more
'The British Road to Socialism'
For some time now, the present writer has increasingly felt that the Communist Party’s strategy for achieving socialism in Britain, as embodied in its programme, The British Road To Socialism, is characterized by grave theoretical ambiguities and unresearched but crucial formulations. What follows is an attempt to articulate . . . read more
Confronting Defeat: The German Communist Party
Hermann Weber has added about nine hundred pages to the already long bibliography of German Communist history, with his massive work Die Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus. The first question prospective readers will ask is: did he have to? The answer, on the whole, is yes. These two volumes . . . read more
Marxism and Asia
The upsurge of colonial revolution in recent years has led to a fresh examination of earlier Marxist work on this topic, both by Marx and Engels themselves, and by theorists of the Third International. This book gives a serious and mainly non-polemical approach to some aspects of this . . . read more
Swedish Communism--End of an Interlude
The Twenty-Second Congress of the Swedish Communist Party—since 1967 called Left Party (Communist) or VPK—on September 19th–21st put an end to a period in the history of the party, hitherto unique in the annals of the international movement. A balance-sheet of this period and of the congress . . . read more
The Popular Front in Finland
Since March 1966, Finland has been governed by a Popular Front coalition which includes the agrarian Centre Party, the Social-Democratic Party, and the Communist Party. The Finnish Popular Front is so far a unique phenomenon in Europe: it is the first time for 20 years that a Communist . . . read more
Problems of Communist History
We are today at the end of that historical epoch in the development of socialism which began with the collapse of the Second International in 1914 and the victory of the Bolsheviks in October 1917. This is therefore a suitable time to survey the history of the Communist . . . read more
Introduction to article on Greek Communist Party
The article on the Greek Communist Party which follows first appeared in Literani Listy, the Czechoslovak weekly. It is of interest on three counts. First, it was published in Czechoslovakia during the summer of 1968. Second, it attempts to tackle historically the problem of the relationship between the . . . read more
The Greek Communist Party
At the 12th plenary session of its Central Committee, which met between the 3rd and 12th February 1968, the Greek Communist Party split. A captive of its myths, transplanted into a foreign environment, institutionalized in the framework of a dubious legality, cut off from the political and social . . . read more
The PCF and its History
The socialist revolution in France cannot be a repetition of the May events, any more than the 1917 Revolution (February and October) was a repetition of 1905. The May events were a tremendous explosion, in which (through tracts, meetings, newspapers and even sometimes through the distorted accounts in . . . read more
Communists and the Australian Left
The political fortunes of the Australian Left have reached a low pass. In the national elections late in 1966, the Australian Labour Patty sustained its greatest electoral defeat of all time, recording the lowest percentage of the total vote since 1906. More galling for the left wing inside . . . read more
The Communist Party in the 1920s
For the last 46 years the Communist Party has played a part in left-wing politics in Britain out of all proportion to its membership and electoral support. Other left-wing Socialist groups, organizations, campaigns and journals have come and gone. But the continued existence of the Communist Party, despite . . . read more
The Morning Star
‘Surely there never was a daily paper set going in such conditions, under such almost frightening handicaps.’ This is the late William Gallacher recalling, 35 years later, the birth of the Daily Worker. For years before that, and in the years since, every socialist who understands that first . . . read more
Communist Party Congress
A delegate writes: British Communists, no less than other sections of the left, are faced with the problem of taking an attitude to the Labour Government. ‘Why has the Labour Government been unable to provide even the basis for solving problems in which not only its own future . . . read more
The Swedish Left
The general societal setting of contemporary Swedish politics has been analysed elsewhere by the present writer in terms of the combination of—to use Gramscian categories—working-class political dominance with a continuing latent hegemony of the bourgeoisie. This situation has positive implications for left-wing action and thinking. Working-class political dominance . . . read more
French Communism
The history of Communism in the developed economies of the west has been the history of revolutionary parties in countries without insurrectionary prospects. Such countries may be, and at various times in our century have been, involved in revolutionary activities arising out of the international contradictions of capitalism . . . read more
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
This is an intellectual’s book about intellectuals. Caute is a historian of concepts and he finds it difficult to accept that political leaders may at times act in response to motivations that are not entirely the result of intellectual choice. In reading his account of the Parti Communiste . . . read more
Three Currents in Communism
Hegel says somewhere that any party is real only when it becomes divided. The idea, far from being a paradox, is simple and profound in its dialectical realism. Any political movement (or any philosophical school of thought) as it grows and develops cannot help unfolding the contradictions inherent . . . read more
The Debate of the Central Committee of the Italian Communist Party on the 22nd Congress of the CPSU
The Italian Communist Party, in exile and jail for 20 years under Mussolini, was re-formed in 1944 in the throes of the Resistance. Relatively uncompromised by the equivocations and complicities of the 30’s, the Party’s formative experience was national resistance and insurrection. The majority of its cadres were . . . read more